Petraeus: So Far, Nothing More Than a Soap Opera

Me? I don't really care. People have affairs. And the higher up someone goes on the security-clearance ladder, the more subject their lives are to scrutiny. No big deal.

I remember discussions about these kinds of things in the military family I grew up in. When someone was proposed to get a higher security clearance, internal affairs officers would show up at the front doors of that person's friends, coworkers, family members, even neighbors. Did this person have gambling issues? Drinking issues? Weird habits or hobbies? Affairs? Was he/she closeted? Did this person have anything, anything at all, to hide? In the security-clearance world, secrets and blackmail are no joke.

So it makes total sense to me that a CIA chief would have a secret discovered by internal surveillance and then get busted. It's a simple equation: Guy has affair with a reporter, guy gets promoted to higher-level security job, secret gets discovered, it's a bad secret (you don't dally with a reporter), guy has to resign.

The rest of the information is just soap-opera noise for a news cycle that's still jacked up from the adrenaline of the 2012 election. (So far, anyway.)

In more interesting news, Venice is flooding—and coping. They may be a model for the rest of us coastal-city dwellers as we think about how to deal with the inevitability of climate change messing with our lives.

Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report’s lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.

“This is the sort of thing we were talking about,” said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. “You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”